AGGIS: A project and webpage for better governance in sport

On this website, you can follow and contribute to the ongoing debate about good governance in the European and international sports organisations.

How can international sports organisations improve their governance and strengthen their credibility?

Rarely a week goes by without grave reports surfacing about voting scandals, mandate fraud, secret accounts or embezzlement within the top flight of international sports leaders.

For many years Play the Game has worked on exposing and debating the considerable shortage of democracy, openness and economic transparency in many of the sports world’s international organisations.

Thanks to a 198,000 euro grant from the European Commission’s Sport Unit, Play the Game and the Danish Institute for Sports Studies (Idan) had the opportunity to look for solutions in cooperation with a European expert group.

Play the Game/Idan’s project ‘Action for Good Governance in International Sports Organisations’ (AGGIS) was among 12 projects chosen from a total of 106 applications awarded funding from the European Commission in October 2011 to contribute to the Commission’s so-called ‘Preparatory Actions’ initiative meant to pave the way for the EU’s future strategies in the field of sport.

Project planAt their first meeting in January 2012, the project partners agreed to prepare a global index for good governance in sport.

The first step was to carry out a thorough empirical analysis of the state of governance in a wide range of organisations as of today. Simultaneously, senior academic research in the expert group took place to lay a solid theoretical foundation for future efforts.

From the autumn of 2012, the focus was on building a measuring tool which can be used by sports organisations themselves or by their stakeholders to discuss the governance standards of the organisation in question.

On this website we invite you to follow and actively contribute to exchange facts, first-hand experiences and opinions about sports governance. We collect a number of the most relevant academic and journalistic publications on the subject of sports governance in general and regularly report on new developments inside and outside the EU project.

The website is a long-term vision of Play the Game/Idan and is intended to continue long after the project money dries out.

The EU project AGGIS was concluded in the first half of 2013 and the main proposals were presented at a seminar in Brussels in April 2013.

Project partners from six countriesIn the quest for useful solutions, Play the Game/Idan partnered up with a group of experienced academic experts from around Europe.

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